


Forgotten

by noblewriting



Category: Beauty and the Beast (1991), Beauty and the Beast (2017), Beauty and the Beast - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dark, F/M, Slow Build
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-16
Updated: 2018-12-27
Packaged: 2019-04-23 14:58:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 16
Words: 13,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14334960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noblewriting/pseuds/noblewriting
Summary: What if the Enchantress came one day late? What if the staff weren’t nearby when the curse was cast? What if Adam found himself alone when turned into a Beast?  How would that change so many lives?“The prince [was] forgotten by the world, for the enchantress had erased all memory of them from the minds of the people they loved….”





	1. Not a Care in the World

The ball was flawless. In the garden, the roses continued to reach to the sky, and the storm brushed away; the lights shut off in the palace, one by one, and the music faded to silence. The prince went to bed with one or two or three pretty women he wouldn’t care for by the next day. Up in his room, Lumiere popped open a bottle of champagne.

Plumette, lighting the candles by the bed, grinned at him over the flames. He laughed and raised his glass.

“Another sublime night, _ça va_ , _mon amour_?” The door creaks and in come Mrs. Potts, Cogsworth, Chapeau, the visiting musicians. The word has quickly spread that Lumiere and Plumette are serving leftover croquembouche in their room; the staff find places to sit, glasses to drink from, hands to join and caress. Mrs. Potts, in a rocking chair, smiles and holds a sleeping Chip.

“How many parties has it been now?”

Cogsworth is counting on his fingers. “Thirty years’ worth at least…..no, forty. Lord, I can’t keep track of the time.”

“He’s turning just like his father—the prince’s father was like this, too,” Mrs. Potts explains to the musicians, who know nothing about the palace or its politics. They nod and move closer to each other on the bed. “We don’t know _what_ he’d do without us. He’ll be fine, though; we try not to intervene. D’you only have wine up here, Lumiere? I could use a cup of tea.”

“If you cannot take a little sparkling wine, get yourself to bed, grandmother,” laughs Lumiere, and she swipes at his arms and makes him laugh. He eases into a seat between Cogsworth and Plumette and throws his arms around them.

“Think how long it has been!” he says. “Forty years for you, Cogsworth, but most of my life for mine. Why, I came here as a teenager—imagine me, only a little older than Chip! Fresh out of Paris and still reeking of the apothecary shop.” He grimaces, thinking of his father’s dusty store in a side-street of the city. He had fled, then, looking for the glamor his missed; in his room in Paris he had practiced dance steps, reveled in fashion, adopted the graceful movements of the court as rebellion against the bourgeois facts of an ordinary existence. He had come to this palace, and he had lit into life; dancing and feasting and glowing like gold made Lumiere’s heart sing.

“We met in this palace, do you remember, _mon trésor_?” Plumette is close in his arms; her scent—fresh and light, like candy and macarons—right beside him. “I was only fourteen, and I loved you right away.”

“I loved you before I met you,” murmurs Lumiere. “I could never forget.”

“Well, that’s _quite_ enough of that,” says Cogsworth, perhaps a bit too loudly. The two lovers had forgotten how close he was to their embrace. “To bed, to bed! Tomorrow we have another morning—and so many mornings after that, to care for the prince and these grounds. We can save affection for another day.”

Lumiere sighs loudly, but the staff agree to part for the night. They hug and kiss and wave goodnight—Cogsworth studiously looking the other way as Plumette makes no indication of moving back to her own room—and the lights go out. The humans of the castle sleep.


	2. Selfish and Unkind

The next day is their day off. It is their one day off in the year. Adam would frequently wish to deny them of it; it is too much for him to imagine coping alone for one day, though he never puts it in such vulnerable terms. Instead, he just has a foul temper about it.

“And you’ll be back tonight, seven sharp.”

“ _Oui, maître._ ”

“And the kitchens have been stocked? Or have you forgotten that, too, in your delight to run away?”

“ _Non, maître_.”

“You know, this is an incredible liberty. Most princes wouldn’t let their staff go prancing off to—I don’t know, what do you _do_ in the village, drink beer and talk about _swine_? Pfft. I would just stay, if I were you.”

“…. _non, maître_.”

“Fine. Get out.”

They are gone all too quickly. Adam stands in the lonely, empty halls. If he stands in the tower, he can see them weaving their way through the forest and down to the village, to spend their day in the company of each other, in Lumiere and Plumette’s case, or with loved ones, in the case of Mrs. Potts. No matter what, all the servants have each other. And Adam has nobody.

He adjusts his wig, tosses a curl. He doesn’t care. They’re all uncaring fools. He debates his options for the day: spending it in the library sounds the best, but  he could also search around the palace, try to find some mistake in its keeping to yell at them about when they got back….after all, at least when he yelled they _looked_ at him.

Searching for the mistake it was, then. Adam trotted off, his heels slick against the polished floors, the sun shining bright.


	3. All Those Precious Days

In the village, Lumiere kisses Plumette, his lips as warm on hers as the sun is right behind their heads. She is feather-light beside him; watching her dance to a tune of her own making, Lumiere is hot with twenty years of memories. Remember her smile when he set the table for the first time, and made the knives and forks flip like acrobats? Remember when he helped her with her hair, after it rained, and she was his best friend and so fair beside him, while he untied the knots and tried to coax out a curl? His life is beautiful with Plumette—and Plumette, smiling back at him, is more beautiful than his life.

Chip runs ahead of Mrs. Potts, calling for his papa. Jean Potts, emerging from his home, waves joyously at the staff now flooding the village. Really, Villeneuve is not big enough to support so huge a gathering—but it is only one day, after all, as the staff step out of the palace and spend a day in the sun. They stretch their limbs and visit the shops, and sit on the stoops and talk. Lumiere is dazzling in his yellow palace coat against the dingy brown of the steps. Plumette is the loveliest girl in the village. Cogsworth checks the clocktower’s time against his own. And at 6:45, by his watch, they prepare to go back to the palace.

_In Adam’s tower, he hears the knock. Angry at having been left alone—angry at being abandoned—angry at everything, Adam slams open the door and sees an old crone._

6:55. Lumiere is running late, as usual. He was regaling Tom and Dick with a lavish description of the ball he is planning. Cogsworth groans at the delay.

_The crone offers a rose. Payment for a night’s rest; there is an oncoming storm. Rain coming in._

“Fireworks! And flowers on every table! And dancers from Vienna—the glories of a courtly life, gentlemen, you must come join us—”

“ _Lumiere_! The night grows old.”

_The crone grows young.  
_

6:59. “We were meant to be there minutes ago! The Prince is all alone in the palace, now, and it’s our fault. We must get back, or there will be hell to pay—”

_The Enchantress sets her curse. The piper must be paid. There must be punishment—_

7:00. The curse strikes; a fleeting darkness on the village, a lasting one on the palace. The palace, the palace…the palace…..

………..the _palace?_

What palace? The villagers do not remember. And the staff, caught among them, do not either. There is silence, and darkness, and sleep.


	4. Little Town

Belle wakes up to a jolt in the road, and the rough wool blanket on her face, and the smell of cheese and paint and horse and wind clinging to her skin. She rubs her eyes and tries to wipe away the sleep. They’re in the wagon, again, and Maurice is hunched up in the bench, encouraging Philippe to trot faster. The contents of Belle’s entire life are jammed in around her, a moving nest of drawings and gear-boxes and packets of cabbage-seed.

“That town didn’t work out, either?”

“Plague,” says Maurice, and his eyes shadow, and he watches the road more closely. Of course. How many times has Belle woken up this way, the town she thought they’d live in forever far behind, her father just in front, the wagon rattling beneath her as Maurice fled the city sickness from one town to another. Lilles, Reims, Amiens: each one tainted by plague, each one not safe enough for Maurice and his daughter. No home lasted long enough.

“And where does this road go?” Belle’s eyes adjust to the dawn—they are passing a forest, and coming through a field, now, and fields lead to country villages, and villages mean homes, at least for a while. Perhaps this one would be small enough and safe enough to hide them for a while.

“Villeneuve,” says Maurice. “I chose it by chance. I hope they have room for an inventor.”

“ _Two_ inventors,” says Belle, and Maurice smiles.

“Yes, two, always two.”

They get to the town just after market-time, and Maurice busies himself finding the local priest to inquire after empty houses. Belle, tucked in the wagon, looks out on a quiet village going through the endless routine of a Saturday market: the milliner batting a sheet out the window, the potter’s wife brushing off her stoop, the sound of an untuned violin drifting from the open tavern doors. People haggle and argue and, somewhere, something breaks.

And Belle’s eyes flicker through the crowd, a puzzle cutting across her heart.

“Why are there so many people?” Belle asks, when Maurice comes back with happy news of an empty house, recently abandoned, just at the edge of the village.

“Mm?”

“People. Why are there so many of them? I know it was just market-time, but there are enough people in these streets to account for a city—let alone this little town!”

“I expect the city is just off on winter holiday,” says Maurice, absent-mindedly, trying to work out the details of keys and locks. “So they’re all just living in this one for now. Come give me a hand with these boxes—thank you.”

Belle’s heart won’t stop wondering, even as she unpacks music-boxes and arranges her father’s paints by the window. She saw all the people in that market. And she sees them now—watching her and her father, peeking on the edges of the streets and peeping through windows. But no one comes to help. With the market done, the town is quiet, and a little gloomy in the afternoon light.

By mid day, Belle and her father are halfway done unpacking. Maurice sits on a box and wipes his forehead.

“Do you know what I forgot to pack?” he says. “Beef. And bread. And….well, anything edible, really. You wouldn’t have remembered, would you?”

“Papa, I was asleep. I couldn’t remember anything.”

“True, true.” Her father’s hands brush in front of his sad, blue eyes. “Might you go out and find some, Belle? There must be someone selling bread. And butter. And possibly jam?”

Belle is already at the door with her basket. “You rest your eyes, papa. I’ll be right back.”


	5. Every Day Like The One Before

Now that she is out, Belle takes the chance to look around. She takes her time going through the streets. On her left, the clock tower chimes. On her right, houses line the streets like soldiers. A cluster of girls giggle across the market square. Somewhere, a tea kettle screams. Belle stops to form her opinion of her new hometown.

Villeneuve is ordinary, in the extreme. Dusty to a fault. Dull, and cross, and tired—and absolutely not the start of any great adventure, like she’s always wished for. Just an overcrowded little place stuck in some meadow-grass that everyone has forgotten about. 

Nothing of note will ever happen in Villeneuve. As far as anyone can remember, nothing ever has. 

And as she thinks that, a puff of smoke blows into her face and sends her thoughts flying. 

“Pardon my intrusion, mademoiselle,” says a voice to her right. Belle looks, and sees nothing, and then looks down and sees a peasant sitting on the stoop of the potter’s house. He is smoking a pipe, and puffing the smoke, and his eyes are closed, and his limbs lie around him as if lifeless. 

“You are Parisian,” she says. She caught it in his voice.

“ _Oui, mademoiselle_ ,” he says. A tiny, delicate gesture from his long fingers; it is a surprisingly sophisticated movement for a man in a yellow peasant’s vest, with candle wax creased in the dirt between his fingernails. “Or at least, once I was. Now I live in Villeneuve.”

It is an oddly empty statement, thinks Belle, and his colorless tone doesn’t help. She can’t see his face, here in the shadows, and can’t tell quite if he’s joking. 

“I was an apothecary’s son,” adds the man. 

“And are you still an apothecary?”

“I am _nothing_ now,” says the man, in a flash of vehemence so sharp it is like seeing a flame in the middle of the forest. He looks up to her—his face broad, and white; and it is an empty face, and beyond the fire in his words there is nothing there at all. It is as if someone washed out all his color, and left him only with his yellow vest.  

“I am Lumiere,” he says, and sadness rests inside his eyes. 


	6. Full of Little People

He welcomes her to the stoop with the flick of a wrist and a tiny nod with the pipe, though he doesn’t seem to really care if she stays or goes. He is still curling smoke, and for one quick moment Belle wonders if it might be foolish to share a stoop with the village’s homeless philosopher. And yet…there’s a kind of warmth, there, buried beneath the village dirt and the lifeless limbs. 

She sits. He offers her the pipe. She refuses. He smokes in silence.

They are silent for a long, long time. 

“So what brings you to Villeneuve?” the man asks, at last, as he refills his pipe. 

“My father,” she says. “We were fleeing plague. And I need to buy some bread, and maybe a little venison—we only had time to pack our books, so we don’t have anything to eat, yet.”

Beside her, Lumiere laughs. It sounds as if he hasn’t laughed for quite some time. 

“I knew someone once who treasured books that way as well,” he says, and a smile drifts across his face, homeless. Something in him is sparking up at the story: dim, and faint, but laughing. “He once made me read the whole Odyssey—”

“You’ve read the Odyssey?!” Belle has never gotten the chance. It hasn’t been translated out of the Greek.

“ _Non, non_ , mademoiselle, it was read _to_ me. Sorceresses turning people to pigs, and the lily-eaters forgetting their homes, and Penelope undoing the days until her husband returns— _such_ nonsense.” The spark goes out abruptly, and he returns to his smoke and shadow. “I do not remember the rest of the story.”

 _How on earth did he get someone to read him the Odyssey, translating it fresh out of the Greek as he goes?_ In no apothecary’s street has Belle ever seen a sight such as that. The book is too rare to have come to Villeneuve. And yet….

“How did _you_ come to Villeneuve?” she asks. 

“I suppose I thought I’d find employment,” he says, and suddenly Belle is frightened.

Deeply, deeply frightened. Not of the man on the stoop—she has never seen anyone _more_ harmless, to be quite honest; he is such an empty man, with such silent, lifeless limbs—but of the thing inside his eyes when he speaks of his past. It is _Other_ —a thing not rooted in a Parisian background, or the empty face, or the subdued soul. It is a large streak of gray inside the man’s blue eyes, a gray empty and unnatural and as hollow as cold ice. Staring at his eyes, Belle finds herself clutching her arms with fear. 

“Ah! _Mon ami!_ ” yells Lumiere, waving into the village, and the feeling passes. Yet his eyes remain so empty, even as he smiles at the man in the brown coat who just came out of the clock tower. 

“Shh, shh, she doesn’t know I’m out,” says the man, and he reaches into his coat and pulls out a bottle of dandelion wine, already uncorked. He passes it to Lumiere in a swift gesture. It is obvious to Belle that this is a practiced ritual, the sharing of the secret wine. She makes room for the clocktower-keeper, and he sits on her other side.

“Mademoiselle, my venerable friend, Monsieur Cogsworth. You will find him delightful company, as well as an excellent source for half-bad wine.” 

“Better than a source of all-bad whining, like some of us,” grumps the man. His nose is red, and his coat is plain and unadorned besides his golden pocketwatch. “You must pardon Lumiere, Miss—”

“Belle! I am Belle. You are English?”

“Mm, yes—suppose you still hear it—never gotten the grasp of the damned accent.”

“ _Oh là là,_ he acts as if the French accent is _difficult_ ,” says Lumiere, puffing smoke, and Belle laughs between the two of them. She is happy that at least there are two friendly souls in this village—grumpy ones, yes, ones with little to recommend them; a drunkard and a smoker, crouched on a village stoop—but friendly ones, at least, with something kind between them. 

“And you keep the clocktower?”

“Tic toc,” says Cogsworth. He drinks the wine a bit too fast. “Used to have a career as a diplomat, don’t you know—but I suppose that…that I wanted to settle down, or some such thing.” He looks at Belle, vaguely, and a chill snakes down her spine. His eyes are gray-streaked too. 

“Cogsworth,” screams someone, across the square, and he is up and moving faster than Belle would have believed. He mutters one word—“Clothilde,” as if that is explanation enough—and disappears back to his clocks. 

Lumiere holds the wine bottle he left behind, weighing it carelessly with one hand, his movements listless. He has not taken one more sip before the shutters over the stoop bang open.

“ _Lumiere!_ What are you doing there?” calls a woman from the window. Beside Belle, Lumiere rolls his eyes and looks, shamefaced, up to the sound.

“Get off my stoop!” yells the woman. “D’you have wine down there, Lumiere?“

“If you cannot take a little cheap wine, get yourself to bed, grandmother,” calls Lumiere. 

“Off with you, now—not on my stoop—begging your pardon, miss—town drunkards, the both of them. Welcome to Villeneueve,” and the woman slams the window. 

“Who was that?” The woman’s face was sharp as a shard.

“Mrs. Potts, the crockery-man’s wife,” says Lumiere, and takes a large gulp of the wine. “I barely know her. Thank God.”


	7. In the Midst of All This Sorrow

While Lumiere drinks and smokes, Belle watches him and watches this village. There is something very strange, here—gaps in memory, gaps in the storyteller’s story. Lumiere spoke brilliantly, eloquently, about a Greek translation he could not remember—and yet his own life is unknown, an impossible one of an apothecary’s son, with no knowledge of the apothecary himself, coming to a distant village and then doing nothing for twenty years. And Cogsworth, too, a diplomat—

“Surely you do _something_ here?” It’s rude, but she can’t help it.

“What could I do, mademoiselle? I have no skills for Villeneuve. I cannot herd sheep. I cannot shoot cows. I am useless.” His beautiful hands gesture again, pointlessly, to the swine and chickens and village dust surrounding them. 

“You must have something that Villeneuve needs. Why, my father is an artist! And an inventor! If this village can have that, it can have…whatever you do.”

“I do nothing, mademoiselle,” he says, again, and his foot traces a dance step against the dirt, and then is quiet again. “Nothing on nothing, everyday, mademoiselle. Forevermore.”

“Then why do you _stay_ here?”

He doesn’t answer. His eyes are following nothing across the square.

“Why do you stay, Lumiere?”

His hand on her arm is sudden and swift and shocks her. If she thought she saw a flicker before, it is nothing to the blaze that has shot up in his eyes now—almost dimming the gray, almost catching it out in a sudden sparkle.

“ _She_ is why, mademoiselle.”

He was not looking at nothing before. Turning, Belle sees what he was following: the entrance of a flock of ladies into the square, a giggling squadron of petticoats and primped hair. Three of the girls are dressed almost identically in pink, and they are pretty enough—but the fourth one, dressed all in white, covered in stray feathers from the gaggle of geese she tends, is _beautiful_. Even plucking feathers from her hair, and leaning against her goose-girl’s staff, she is the most beautiful woman Belle has ever seen.

“I have never dared to speak to her,” whispers Lumiere, and she is drawn back to his face. It was so empty, before, but now it is flickering fast—with hope, and love, and despair. “She would never love a hopeless idiot. But Plumette makes me so weak, I could never be strong….”

“You’ve never _spoken_?”

“ _Non!_ How could I dare? She is flawless.”

“ _Twenty_ years you’ve lived here, and you’ve never even _spoken?!_ ”

“ _C’est la vie_ ,” says Lumiere, and the light goes out as he stares hopelessly after her. “She would never look at me. She probably loves the same one as the rest of them…”

There is a sound of hoof-beats approaching the square. “What one as the rest of them?”

Lumiere cannot sink into the steps any further. “If you want venison, mademoiselle, that is who to get it from.”

It feels like an explosion into the square. The minute the man in red rides in, there is a crow of praise from every window— “he returns!” “Ey, ey! Gaston! Bonjour!”—a sweep of giggling from the girls across the square. The iron-shod hooves slam against the cobblestones, and the quiet of Villeneuve falls apart. The conquering hero comes. 

“Make a lane! Make a lane!” Somebody rides beside Gaston. There is no need to make a lane—there is nobody in the square—yet the fanfare goes on. The man in red throws a fresh-dead deer onto the cobblestones; the town applauds. 

“He’s just a man. I don’t see what they’re on about,” says Belle. 

Lumiere puffs his pipe. “Don’t tell the other girls you said that,” he says. “As a matter of fact, don’t tell me either. I don’t need his attention today—”

“Ah, the village idiot!” Gaston is already on them. His lackey is right behind him. “Drunk, again, old friend?”

“You are not my friend,” says Lumiere, but low. His eyes don’t meet Gaston’s. He has drawn further into the shadow.

“Oh, I am not your ‘ _mohnaaahmii_ ’?” Gaston is mocking Lumiere’s Parisian accent; the whole square laughs beside him. 

“It’s two words, not one,” Lumiere says, lower still. “If you cannot charm with rapier wit, do not hit me with your dull bullets.”

The blow is swift and immediate, and Belle draws back as Lumiere’s jaw hits against the wall. His hand is slow in reaching up to the wound. Even in pain, his eyes don’t quite focus. Like the wine, it is evident this is a practiced ritual.

“He _was_ right about ‘mon ami,’” says the lackey, faintly. “We’ll work on the  grammar.”

“Who needs it?! It certainly hasn’t gotten this prancing fool anywhere,” says Gaston. “Dancing and manners! In Villeneuve! Coward. Storyteller. Lily liver.” 

“Leave him alone,” says Belle. _Storyteller_. _Lily liver. Like the lily-eaters in the Odyssey._ Lumiere knows the Odyssey, Lumiere welcomed her to the stoop; Lumiere is the village idiot, and an empty soul, and a useless one, and _still_ : “Even if he is nothing—and he isn’t—he’s my friend. Leave him alone. Whoever you are, he’s better than you!”

The square is instantly silent. Beside her, Lumiere murmurs “foolish, foolish” into his hands. 

“You’re…new,” says Gaston.

“Leave him alone.” Belle is fearless.

“Of course, mademoiselle,” and Gaston is so instantly full of smiles it is like a coin flipped. “I look forward to seeing more of you.”

Belle just looks at him. He is the first man in Villeneuve without a streak of gray inside his eyes.

“Mark my words, though—this man has no one in this town.” Lumiere, dark in the shadows, cringes beside her as Gaston speaks. “Only a lonely dreamer. Nothing more than a village punching-bag, is he, LeFou? He only lives to serve!” He is mocking the accent again. 

“He doesn’t serve you,” says Belle. “And he’s not alone.”

No one in the village backs her up. Across the square, the girls in pink frown. The one in white has let her eyes drop: in shyness, or shame, or second-hand embarrassment, Belle can’t tell.

Gaston rides off, the village cheering. (though a little less proudly than before.) Lumiere’s jaw is fine—a black bruise against the cleft chin, one of many she did not see before—and he waves her away. 

“Please tell me he does not do that every day,” she says. 

“I don’t remember,” says Lumiere, “but if he did it every day, I think I might be dead. It has only been a decade or two, eh? Go home, mademoiselle. Don’t come back for dreamers.”

The Other thing inside his eyes has deepened. There is almost no blue at all. The apothecary’s son, with nothing in his days besides shame and smoke, leans back up on his stoop. A cold wind blows through the square, black and blue, and Belle’s hands clench from the cold. 

There is something wrong in Villeneuve. And how she longs to find it out.


	8. Not Whole Without A Soul

It’s a week later, and Belle is off to see Lumiere again. He does, in fact, live somewhere besides other people’s stoops—a rundown shed, apparently, tucked behind the meadow, though she’s not gotten to visit it. He says, with a small, quiet joke, that it’s not fit for company until he can hang a chandelier. 

She’s almost reached his usual stoop when the rain hits. She puts her apron over her head, but it’s no good; there are sheets of tattered rain across the village, and her hair is soaked in moments.

“Come in, girl, come in! Out of the cold, and the wet—oh, aren’t you a vision—of damp—”

Outlined by the light of an open door, she sees the potter’s wife. Mrs. Potts’ rough hands take Belle and pull her into the kitchen before she can think.

“Th-thank you. That was kind of you.” She is dripping all over the floor. Mrs. Potts sees her and slides a tea-tray beneath her feet, to catch the wet.

“Come on, dear, let’s sit you by the fire—we’ll get you a cup of tea—there, dear. By the chair.”

Belle curls gratefully onto the bench by the fire, and Mrs. Potts turns to her table to prepare the drinks. And something moves in the soot of the dark fire place, almost like it’s _alive_ —

“Sorry! I shouldn’t have moved…I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“There, now, Chip, move on,” says Mrs. Potts, and the soot-covered thing turns into a little boy, cheeky and smiling. He waves at Belle before running away. His clothes smell of tea: chamomile, lavender, earl gray. 

“My boy,” the woman explains, and hands Belle a cup. “His father’s out, now, but he’ll be back soon. We’ve lived here together in this house for twenty years.” She laughs at some joke that isn’t there. “He made these cups, and he sells the porcelain—you’ve seen him in the market?”

Belle nods. She likes Jean Potts well enough. He does not belittle the village’s drunks and nobodies, though he does seem frightened of them. He has never mocked her for visiting Lumiere and Cogsworth on their stoop in the sun.

“I don’t know why you choose to speak with those tramps,” says Mrs. Potts, as if she reads her thoughts as easy as tea-leaves. “You seem a nice enough young lady to be with the other girls, not with those two…..though Mr. Cogsworth is fine, in his way—but I’d stay away from _that_ one, young lady.” 

“Why?” Belle watches her as she prepares the tea. Mrs. Potts keeps bumping into the table; for all her twenty years inside this kitchen, she has to think twice before she moves. Her hands flick between jars of raisins and flour, and she sidesteps around nothing. It as if she expects a different kitchen, thinks Belle, a kitchen quite different from this small country stove—but twenty years sit there, solid as truth, on the table that has never moved.

“What’s he been telling you out there?” Crunch: Mrs. Potts reached for almonds, not sugar. She puts the tin back hurriedly, cringing, and grabs for the other jar. Her eyes watch her hands, as if checking her own habit.s 

“That he came to Villeneuve many years ago, and hasn’t worked much since,” says Belle. “Small jobs, the occasional village fete—but he doesn’t know how to do anything too useful to the village. So he sits in the sun.” She doesn’t mention the beautiful goose-girl he waits for. She doesn’t mention that she can’t find out _what_ he waits for, nor Cogsworth either, in this lonely village beside the empty woods. 

Mrs. Potts nods, judgement for Lumiere clear on her face. Belle finds the blood rushing to her face.

“But he’s so much more than just—just a _stoop-dweller_! He comes from Paris. He tells stories! He is _warm_ ,” says Belle, and she stares defiantly into Mrs. Potts’ eyes.

Gasps, and draws back. Mrs. Potts’ eyes are two different shades of gray.

Mrs. Potts blinks, and the gray ripples, and the older woman sighs and smooths Belle’s hands.

“I know, dear. I am sure he might be. I’ve never spoken to him much, myself. But you have to understand—he doesn’t belong in this village. He doesn’t _belong_.”

She moves around to sit by Belle, but she runs into the table first. 

“There are stories about him—stories he doesn’t like to tell. Oh, I know, I seem like an outsider here too, with my English accent and—” She laughs and waves hands around her frazzled hair, and loses the path of the sentence. “But young one, you’ve got to look out—we don’t know who his father is, we don’t know—”

“How long have you lived here?” Belle tries not to phrase it as a challenge. Mrs. Potts means well—she lets soaked artists’ daughters out of the rain, after all—but the sharp shards in her voice have no place with her soft hands, and her boy, and the tea now boiling over on a stove she’s forgotten the place of. 

“Twenty years, dear, just here in this house.” Mrs. Potts sits back and smiles at her. “Do you know, I used to look kindly on those Parisian types myself, before I came to Villeneuve; I’d never met one, but I thought I might work for—there, now, you don’t care about that. I’m not a working woman, dear. I’m all cooped up,” and she laughs, again, in a faded voice, like there’s a joke she’s just forgotten. 

The swirl of gray steeps in the woman’s eyes.


	9. Here's a Thought, Perhaps

“I don’t understand.” Belle slams her books down on the kitchen table. Maurice looks up from a new trinket—a music box molded off the design of a ballroom; it sounds charming, though he hasn’t put in any dancers yet—and catches how tan she’s gotten from sitting on sunny stoops. They’ve lived here in Villeneuve for several weeks, now; he’s happy she’s settling in. 

“More books from Pere Robert, I see,” he says mildly. Belle fidgets with _Sleeping Beauty_ like its pages are a problem to be solved, opening and closing the story of the sleeping palace that stood for a hundred years.

“Yes, they’re lovely, but….Papa, this town makes no sense.”

“Very few things do.” He smiles and puts aside his music box. “What’s enchanting you now, my darling?”

“Papa, this is a _little_ village, isn’t it?”

“That’s why I chose it. Does that trouble you, my dear?”

“No. I like the people, I’m making friends with some of them, I never thought I would….” She trails off. Most people in most towns think she’s odd; that’s why she turned to books, because they had people in them that didn’t laugh at her—well, that and the books had worlds she was longing to explore, far out of the realm of her little towns and cities and gossiping market squares. But here in Villeneuve, in this town just like any other, she’d somehow managed to find a few souls who didn’t mind her oddness—who loved her for it, in fact; who seemed to find in her something they found familiar, something that reminded them of someone they had all loved once. Why, just today, Cogsworth had been talking of this young man he knew, whose golden hair always got loose from his ribbon and fell all over his shoulder, just like hers did….but then he’d forgotten about it, and when she asked him about where she could find him in the village, he’d blinked and asked her if she meant Gaston.

Of _course_ she didn’t mean Gaston. She meant Cogsworth’s young man with the golden hair, and Lumiere’s old friend who quoted Shakespeare in the bath, and the boy Mrs. Potts had watched before she had Chip, the boy who had wanted to wear blue every day for a year. Everyone had a story that came and went and that they never told again: even the silent milliner’s son, playing his violin in the tavern for a few coins, would play a tune about someone no one could name. But Belle could never find all these missing people, no matter where she looked. 

“For a little village, there are spots missing,” she says. “And I’ve been talking to people left and right, and there are some things that just seem so _odd_. Did you know that Madame de Garderobe and Maestro Cadenza came here, a few years ago? World-famous musicians! What were they doing here? They said they got lost on the way to Edinburgh, but they were coming from London. How could they get so lost?”

“That _is_ strange.”

“They played a concert for the villagers, apparently, but no one really remembers it, or they won’t talk about it. It’s as if they’re all hiding something, or really afraid of something.”

“They might be afraid of that big red galoot, whatever his name is,” suggests Maurice. “You know the one, stepped on our cabbages the other day.”

“Ugh.” Belle hisses out a breath. “He treats them so badly—though they treat each other badly, too. Mrs. Potts doesn’t trust Lumiere, but will never tell me why. They could be friends, if they tried to know each other.”

“You think so well of the world,” says Maurice, softening as he looks at his daughter. “You would believe a rose could lose its thorns if you tried hard enough.”

“It’s not that I believe in change. I believe in…in whatever _this_ is.” Belle throws her hands in the air. “Helping people, fixing what’s broken. There’s something broken here, papa.”

“Mm.” Maurice looks back to his trinket—its melody tinkering out, slow and charming, across his wooden desk. “Do you know, dear, I find the gears of this little castle don’t work right when you have them all apart.”

Belle raises an eyebrow. “Papa?”

“This bit here, it will just sit useless unless I fasten it to another—and I need wire, here, and you know how I’m always losing my screws. Now, if I just rest all the pieces here on the table, like so many soundless, useless objects, we’d never hear that music-box chime, would we?”

“Is this…is this a lesson?” A smile cracks over Belle’s face, slow and steady. “You haven’t instructed me on making music boxes in years, papa.”

“Well, no, not since you got the hang of it…but it still makes me happy to see those gears turn in your head, my girl.”

She’s out the door before he’s finished speaking, eyes alight with a new idea, and she lets it slam behind her, a cold wind blowing through the house as she goes. Maurice’s sketches and drawings and parts tumble over the tabletop, and he turns back to his music-box, paintbrush in hand, ready to work.

Now, if he can just think what sorts of people belong in a ballroom.


	10. And Almost Kind

“Lumiere! Lumiere.” Belle scatters to a stop, her hair already all undone from its braid. Her friend is leaning up against the clocktower, half in its shadow, his brown and yellow peasants’ garb too big for his lanky frame. He barely looks up to see her; his eyes are caught in the white feathers drifting across the square, and the girl trying to pull them from her curly hair.

“Lumiere, please focus. Look, I have an idea.”

“Mm?” One hand is trailing out a dance melody across the clocktower’s stone. Only the sound of the hunting horn—far away, now, but promising a violent return in short order from the local hero—rallies him out of his trance. “Mademoiselle. You were saying?”

“Can I come visit your shed?”

“ _Pardonez-moi?_ ” Alarm knocks out the last vestiges of dreaming in his blue eyes. The grey streaks pulse to a rhythm of their own, frightened and jumpy in contrast to the waltz his fingers still trace. “Mademoiselle! You—you cannot, it is no home for….”

“I’ll bring food. And we’ll sing, all right? We’ll have a party. A dinner party!”

“A…dinner party?” He’s still hesitant, but Belle catches that spark of excitement before he can snuff it out. 

“What is dinner without a little music?” She grins at him. “Come on, Lumiere, you must have thrown a party at least once in your life.”

“I………” He’s somehow gone even whiter from the premise. 

“And I know _just_ who to invite. Hop along, _tout-de-suite_ —” she slaughters the accent, but it gets him smiling, a little, under those sad blue eyes. “We’re going to be needing extra chairs.” 

He bows to her, his yellow vest flapping around him, and just for a second Belle imagines that auburn hair and those elegant white hands somewhere far, far away from Villeneuve. And then he’s up, and off, and before he trips over a sheep he looks almost debonair. 

“Right.” Belle straightens her apron, touches the copy of _The Knights of The Round Table_ she’s slipped into her pocket for luck. She has quite a few people to talk to before sundown, and she wants to be brave.


	11. Prepare And Serve With Flair

“Is this it?” The shed in front of them is tiny, and mouldering, and right on the edge of the meadow. The only signs it’s lived in are the cracks of candelight seeping out the boarded-up windows and the rusty door. 

“It’s shabby enough.” Cogsworth hoists the picnic basket higher. “I still say this is a bad idea.”

“Twenty years you’ve lived here, and you’ve never had dinner with your best friend?”

“And rightly, too,” says Mrs. Potts. “Belle, if I stay here an hour we’ll all be shocked. I don’t like the man, I’ve told you so.”

“Just try it, please? I spent all day cooking this. Or trying to, anyway,” Belle adds, staring down at the burnt contents of her basket with a grimace. Before the others can say anything else, she runs up to the door and knocks. 

It falls over, rust winning over old metal.

“Mr. Chapeau, come along, this is dreadful,” says Mrs. Potts, nearly turning back to the village. 

“No, no, wait! Lumiere? Lumiere, we’re here.” Belle steps through. Cautiously, the others follow. 

Every surface of the tiny shed glows with candelight. In his eagerness to pull off an effect, Lumiere has decked every corner with wax and wicks and glowing golden light; candles drip down chair backs, off iron sconces, across the bare wood of the little table he’s laid. It’s ghastly, but warm, and Belle notices that every table setting—chipped and mismatched though the cups and plates are—is laid out exactly as a courtly table, multiple forks and all.

“We’ve brought food! If it’s edible, which is as yet in doubt. And you know Cogsworth, of course, and Mrs. Potts.”

“Welcome,” says Lumiere flatly. Mrs. Potts rolls her eyes and conspicuously wipes the spots off the silverware with her skirt. 

“And this is Chapeau.” Belle shows in the silent violin player. “He’s friends with Pere Robert. Oh, and—”

Lumiere almost drops the wine Cogsworth brought. He’s staring just past Belle, where the dark, starry sky outlines the girl still standing in his doorway.

Lumiere chokes out a string of wordless syllables. His hands don’t quite know what to do. Plumette, for her part, looks like shyness brought to life. She tries a clumsy curtsy and nearly falls; Lumiere catches her, just in time, and they stare for far too long at their own hands on each other’s shoulders.

Belle pretends not to notice them as she lays out all she’s brought: a simple barley soup, a badly sunken cheese souffle, a cream tart that now just looks like gray stuff. Chapeau helps her serve, holding the plates like he’s done this a thousand times before—though he assures her he hasn’t; that his whole life is Villeneuve and his mother’s loud and lonely hatshop.  

Slowly, everyone sips their drinks (poor Lumiere—he’d set out two glasses for each place, as if they had white wine as well as red—poor village idiot, out of place as ever); slowly, they start to talk, breaking bread and sharing plates of butter. Their host is useless for most of the meal, staring blankly at Plumette as she stares back at him; they sit uncomfortably close, for strangers, and Belle sees how jumpy all the hands and feet at this table are: all longing to get out, to twitch away from this strange warmth and company. Lumiere’s hands are shaking near Plumete’s. 

But food and wine and after-hours chatting has its charms, and slowly people unfurl like flowers after winter: Mrs. Potts going rosy-cheeked as she tells of Chip’s latest antics, Chapeau miming the schoolmaster’s upturned snout for a delighted Cogsworth, Belle sharing her latest book and finding people somehow _interested_. Conversation flows out, golden in the waning night, and midnight passes with no notice. 

“What of you, Plumette? Where do you come from?” Belle leans over Cogsworth, and tries to act as though she doesn’t see Lumiere’s hands shaking as he timidly puts a roll on the goosegirl’s plate. 

“Paris,” says Plumette, and Lumiere’s hands waver like a flame in a storm, “I traveled here, mademoiselle, when I was very young—years and years ago. And I stayed here, oh, I can’t imagine why….” 

There’s a stroke of gray in the big brown eyes. Belle tries to hide her fear. 

“And this is all I’m good at,” and Plumette sighs, and brushes another feather from her hair. “I once dreamed of great romance, of fairytales—but how could it be otherwise? I am a goosegirl in a village. No great love will ever come to me.” And she stares bitterly downward, not seeing the place setting arranged with so much love. 

But then Cogsworth drops his watch in the wine, and Mrs. Potts is laughing so hard she almost cries, and Chapeau fiddles and Lumiere and Plumette clap along (although they refuse to dance). 

They part cheerfully, just as the first rays of the sun start stepping gently over the valley. Lumiere, white as a sheet, plucks up his guttering courage and kisses Plumette’s hand; she blushes as vivid as a robin’s chest, and runs so fast back to her cottage she practically flies. (Lumiere, blushing too, nearly sets himself on fire as he reels into his bed.) Cogsworth stretches and yawns, remarking  on the time; Mrs. Potts helps to pack the baskets, and follows Belle out the door.

“You see?” says Belle, leading the way back to the sleeping village. “That wasn’t so bad, Mrs. Potts.”

“No, well….” Her face, so softened and happy just a moment ago, seizes up into harsh lines as if she’s been caught doing wrong. “And I wouldn’t turn down the sight of doing it again, and perhaps bringing Chip along too. You have a good heart, poppet.”

“But…?” They still stand in darkness, here where their paths part. Belle holds her basket close, her books still resting on top.

“We’ve been set in our ways for twenty years, luv. It would take a miracle, or twenty years back that we will never have, to make us into what you dream of. I’ll try for your sake, dear, really I will, but I would never hold that lot of them dear to my heart.”

She trudges back to the village, and Belle watches her go. She hugs her books and basket to her chest, planning and puzzling away at the village with no hope. 

“Keep putting the pieces together,” she whispers to herself. “Keep putting the pieces together.”


	12. For Still Here I Be

The little band of lonely souls meets every week after that, in Belle’s fresh-scrubbed kitchen or Mrs. Potts’ cluttered living room or the back of the milliner’s shop or at the base of the clocktower. The weather grows cold, so they can’t have the picnic Plumette planned, but they carry it to the church steps, and borrow the sanctuary from Pere Robert. Months pass. Winter creeps in, nipping at their toes.

Slowly, so slowly it aches, Belle sees her friends creeping from their shells. One night sees Chapeau pouring his soul out in a melody dedicated to a woman he says he might have loved; another finds Lumiere juggling clementines with all the joy of a natural performer, looking timidly at Plumette’s delighted face the whole time, like he was shocked to find her there. She herself is too shy to make advances; she explains to Belle that maybe, if she’d met him when she was younger, she would have been bold and light. But a lifetime of being chased—chased from Paris, chased by rough village boys—has left her as fragile as a moonbeam, and frightened to fall in love.

Belle reaches out to her, sympathetic.

“Oh, pouf-pouf,” Plumette laughs and waves her away. “It’s nothing, mademoiselle.”

But Belle catches the little wave of misery that drifts across her face before she turns away.

Now, with the moonlight streaking across the steps of the altar, Plumette touches Cogsworth on the arm, and shyly asks after the stiff spots that wrack his back with nervous tics. Lumiere tells a joke to Chapeau, his hands expansive, his long arms casting shadows on the walls. Mrs. Potts has brought Chip, and he giggles and squirms in her lap, trying to reach the sad, half-burnt pastries they bought from the angry baker at the edge of the village. Curling up, content with his brioche, the boy sleepily asks if the monster is coming tonight.

“The monster?” Belle leans close. “What monster, Chip?”

“Oh, it’s just a foolish fairy-story he brings up when he’s tired,” Mrs. Potts says, looking fondly at her boy. “The monster in the night.”

“Mean,” Chip murmurs. “Lost.”

“Not always a wicked monster, though, is it?” Mrs. Potts laughs. She turns to Belle, confiding: “Sometimes he says the monster wears a tattered blue coat, and walks through halls filled with roses.”

“Roses?”

“Oh, you know, children….none of it is real, none of it could ever be real.” Mrs. Potts gazes up at the rain-streaked stained glass of the chapel window. “He just likes to dream we could have castles, here in Villeneuve.” She laughs, a little harshly, but the laughter drains away, and Belle sees Mrs. Potts looking softer than she ever has before.

The clock chimes the hour: 7 o’clock, and all is well. She leans up against the priest’s bookshelf, and sees Lumiere attempting to hold Plumette’s hand, and quickly looks away again.

“What have you been reading?” says Chapeau, quietly sitting next to her with his bow in his long, thin hands. The others smile at her, and Belle’s find a tight little part of her heart uncoiling: here in Villeneuve, in this collection of outcasts and oddities, Belle has found people who are _happy_ to hear her talk of what she loves.

“ _The Winter’s Tale_ ,” she says. “‘A sad tale’s best for winter: I have one of sprites and goblins’.”

“Monsters!” Plumette whispers in an overly spooky hiss, and her friends laugh and circle closer.

“Once upon a time,” says Belle, her voice low as the stained glass rattles with approaching thunder, “there was a girl who didn’t know she was a princess.”

“ _Oh là là!_ ”

“Rather!”

“Go on, dear, do.”

“She didn’t know what she was. She had been cast away from home—and she’d had to face bears, and storms, and a life that was not her own. She was happy, she thought, or at least she hoped so; for her village was her whole world, and the only excitement she expected was the annual sheep-shearing. And far away, across a whole sea, she never knew how her family’s hearts were breaking.”

“How did this happen?”

“How did she forget?”

“Where were the people who cared for her?”

“Sometimes,” says Belle, and the thunder roars against her ears like it is right outside the church, “sometimes we tell the wrong tale, and the story goes wrong.”

And then the thunder isn’t thunder anymore, and the doors have slammed open into the church, and their sanctuary is tainted by snow and blood-red boots that stomp and swell and filling-the-room.

“Well! Look at this little band of dreamers,” spits the hunter, and Lumiere sinks into the shadow of the altar.

“What are you doing here, Gaston?” Belle cries, anger flicking at the edges of her words like thorns. “What possessed you to come here?”

“The villagers are wondering,” says Gaston. “The villagers are _concerned_. Such a pretty young girl, and she’s—why, she’s wasting her life away among these—these rubbish of the village!”

‘I’ve never seen the village care what I do,” say Belle, her voice taut.

“Oh, but some of us do! Some of us do, my dear,” and his voice is suddenly low and coaxing, pouncing and cradling. “I’ve watched you walk through our village. I’ve seen you stoop to the level of these wanderers—out of loneliness! Never knowing,” and his voice is nearly at a whisper, and his hands cage her against the wall, and he knocks the shelf and all her books go cascading down, “never knowing you had a better sort to spend your time with.”

“Gaston.” Mrs. Potts’ voice has a tremor in it, but she swallows hard and carries on. “Leave the girl alone, do, love. We’re not hurting anything. The priest approves.”

“I thought better of you, Mrs. P.” He turns his persuasion on her, like claws wracking along the flesh of a dead deer. “Mrs. P., once so respectable, now taking tea with degenerates and _thieves_ ,” and he draws the last word out in a hiss that snuffs out the candles.

Lumiere cowers in the shadows, and Cogsworth draws away.

“How dare you call my friends so,” says Belle, but no one else has anything to say. They’ve grown mute. And turning back, she sees them eye each other—suspicion welling in eyes, hands retreating from others’ arms, each face stilling into silence.

“Come on now!” cries Belle. “He’s just a bully, oh, Chapeau! We know each other _better_ than this! Mrs. Potts, none of us are thieves, you wouldnt think so—Plumette, remember how we just laughed over Lumiere’s juggling?”

“Oh, he’s here too, is he?” says Gaston. He draws himself up, seizing the lights from the walls, drawing out the terrified man crouched in the dark. “Well, Belle, you can defend him all you want—but what do you others have to say?”

Plumette won’t meet Belle’s eyes. Plumette won’t meet anyone’s eyes. Fear strikes a match in Belle, and illuminates all the things she didn’t want to face.

Lumiere’s past, wandering and strange. Mrs. Potts’ extreme distaste for him. The stories that don’t make sense. Plumette, timid and afraid. Cogsworth, once a diplomat. The overstuffed houses in the village square, and all these little people hiding in the shadows.

“What did you do?” she whispers, and sees her friends’ eyes are gray as old snow. “What happened here?”

“They didn’t _tell_ you?” Gaston laughs. “Your band of feckless dreamers, of useless spirits, they thought it would be right not to tell you? Storytelling is all well and good, but I prefer the truth.”

“Don’t—” Lumiere flickers, and is quenched by a look.

“Well! Before they read your books with you and told you of their pretty madness, they bedeviled this village and turned it upside-down! Before they came—oh, shut up, little man—” He shoves Lumiere down, lays one rough paw upon Plumette’s shoulder in a gesture of possession. “These four were thought of as crazy, mad, lonely nobodies.”

“How dare you!”

“Would you rather tell the story, Mrs. Potts? The great darkness that came so many years ago, that night that shocked the village with frost, this tide of refugees stealing and taking from across the village?”

“What are you talking about?” Belle cries.

“Tell him, Mrs. Potts. Tell him how we found this stranger dressed in a gold coat far beyond his position, claiming an apothecary’s son could be dressed in satin and silk! Tell him how this snob-nosed peacock fluttered in, claiming she wanted solace but rejecting every man’s advances.” His arm jerks against Plumette, and she shudders in his palm. “Tell him how unsure of who we were, every citizen of Villeneuve, as our houses spilled over with unwanted dreamers! Even respectable people, _Mr_. Cogsworth, _Mrs_. Potts, their eyes clouded, acting strange to their friends and family, acting like there could ever be anything beyond this small village!”

“I woke up in my coat,” says Cogsworth, troubled. “I woke up in a brown diplomat’s coat, far too grand for me.”

“Better than _stealing_ it,” says Gaston. “Lumiere could never give an account of where he got that coat, though all knew it was too grand for the idiot at the edge of the village. And Mrs. Potts acted as if she recognized those traveling musicians, though she’d never seen them before—there were a trifle too many strange things, in those days, and we were wise to look to the outsiders for our reason.”

“Where did you come from?” Mrs. Potts demands of Lumiere.

“How come you never speak?” Cogsworth cries of Chapeau.

“Why are your manners so fine, when you’ve never been to court?” Plumette screams at Mrs. Potts.

“I was never a thief, I was never _anything_ ,” Lumiere yells, pleading, to Cogsworth.

“No one knows you, no one knows where you come from….” Chapeau condemns them all.

“Stop it! All of you, stop it!” cries Belle, but her friends have turned to a mob, hissing at each other and themselves. There is no way to bring sense to it, and Belle sees in Gaston’s sharp, black eyes the mirror of that past night: the confusion and fear in the sudden frost, the outsiders with muddled stories and stolen finery, the useless ones herding geese and taking up their posts on forgotten stoops, silent as the fear and rage of a village turns them into objects. She sees Cogsworth, helplessly examining badges of honor he did nothing to earn; Chapeau holding a violin too fine for his hands, wondering at the loving rosewater scenting the wood. Plumette is there, too, questioned by villagers who mark her as neither friend or family; Mrs. Potts huddles behind her husband, clutching Chip as she does now, terrified of invaders come to break her cloistered, narrow calm. And Lumiere, the man from outside the village, cringing in the light of a torch in his face as he is asked, as he is asked now: _who are you? where did you come from? why are you here, dreamer, storyteller, man without a past?_

Gaston slips out, content, the last of the brioche tucked into his pocket.

There are no gentle good-byes this night. Each flees the church in a different direction, tripping over the moonlight and the snow, no one looking at another. Silence cloaks them. The villagers watch them go from behind their windows, and shut their curtains as the moon dips behind the forest.

Belle stands in the last of the guttering light of the chapel, and sees all her hope go out.


	13. Through the Darkness and the Shadows

They don’t speak to each other for months.

Winter turns to spring, and the little group of wanderers keep their lone-wolf lives apart. Cogsworth tends his clocktower alone. Mrs. Potts shuts her shutters whenever she sees Plumette coming. Chapeau lays his fiddle to rest.

Gaston revels in the ever-fresh applause of the village square, but Belle keeps her windows closed, and only goes out to buy bread and fetch books.

She’s tried everything; she’s talked to Lumiere, teased Chip, coddled Mrs. Potts, even had a raging argument with Cogsworth. But the haunting of their own pasts leaves fresh clawmarks on their skins: they refuse to associate with their old, their new, their borrowed and blue friends. Plumette seems to wither, on the edge of the village square; she doesn’t dare look at anyone, and skirts away whenever Gaston enters the village. 

Cogsworth’s clock chimes all the wrong hours, and Belle—the hub of all these disparate parts, whose anger and sadness and deep, deep grief won’t let her close—despairs.

In the tiny cottage at the edge of the village, she bangs into her pots and pans, she slams trinkets together. The puzzles on this village don’t fit into a neat jigsaw; they’re all tumbled, wrong, into the box, and at least one crucial piece is missing, and all the corners are different sizes. She strings together the lies they say are their life stories—Lumiere a thief, Plumette abandoned and never loved, Cogsworth in his dingy home and Mrs. Potts in her too-small kitchen—and finds rage flitting across her fingertips, at this problem that refuses to be engineered.

The winter thaws, but the villagers’ hearts remain as cold as ever. Belle’s friends never gather or unite. She travels to the market alone.

Sitting with her father on the cottage steps, one evening as the sun sinks low and basks them in violet-dark light and streaks of blue, she asks him what could be going wrong. “Why won’t they let me unite them? Why can’t we be friends, no matter what the past said? No one should be punished for what they did twenty years ago.”

Maurice lifts her chin so she looks him in the eyes, and he smiles at all that righteous indignation: the picture of the bride he fell in love with so many years ago. “How so much anger and so much love can be stirred in one heart is something I will never cease to be grateful for, my dear.”

“I wish someone else would be grateful for it.” She grumphs to herself, drawing her knees tight to her chest. “They need something else, something I can’t provide, to see themselves as I know they are. I know they aren’t just strangers—I know that, that there’s something greater than them….”

Maurice’s eyes grow sad. His daughter has read so many tales of adventure, she always believes that there’s more out there than there might ever be. 

But heaven prevent him from ever telling her so.

“Trust that there will be something good to bring you all together again,” says Maurice. “Trust that good things happen, to all sorts of people.”

“You don’t believe them, do you?” Belle’s eyes grow wide with shock. “You don’t believe that they did something horrible, so many years ago, that’s earned them all the loneliness they have?”

“I can never know for sure, Belle. But if you like them, that’s assurance enough for me.”

Belle is quiet. She does like them, so much. But she wants to solve the problem of this little town. 

The sun sets on Villeneuve, and a beggar woman—wandering past, her hands tucked in her pocket, feeling the glass of a jam-jar and the last crumbs of her loaf of bread—wanders past the cottage, smelling like roses.


	14. Come Together On Their Own

Spring has come and gone, and Summer peeks out of its hood and winks at Villeneuve. Belle’s garden grows, fresh and plump, and she spends days digging in the dirt, muttering fairytales to herself, making sense of her rows of cabbages when she can’t puzzle out the mysteries of the wider world. Her books lounge on sunny windowsills, and her father finishes a new trinket—a little windmill that plays a tune for a sad little painter—and prepares for the country fair.

“What would you like me to bring you from the market?” A silly question, half a joke—she does all the shopping for the whole little family, in her lonely wanderings through Villeneuve’s market square—but once a year he gets to ask, and see her face light up, as she steadies the reins and dusts off the last of the wagon’s dust.  
  
“A rose like the one in the painting.”

“You ask for that every year.”

“And every year you bring it.”

“Then I shall bring you another. You have my word. Come on, Philippe!”—and he’s off, a little too fast for his old bones, jogging over harsh cobblestones.

She smiles as he goes, though she clings to the doorframe a bit more than she would like. “Stay safe,” she murmurs, and shivers in the sunlight.

* * *

He doesn’t stay safe.

He doesn’t come home. 

Belle doesn’t worry—not properly, just gnawing on the edges of her teeth and scrunching up her apron in the usual alarm—but when she hears the horse’s hooves rattling far too fast back over the stones, and hears no wagon wheels beside them, and runs outside and grabs the terrified horse by the mane—then she knows, sure as soot, that harm has come to father.

She never knew she could be so angry. 

She’s saddling Philippe up far too fast, throwing herself together, snatching her cloak off the peg in the hall, and she’s back out to him far too fast—but Lumiere is there, holding the reins, and she can’t throw herself on with six feet of limbs in the way.

“Where are you going, mademoiselle?”

“You’ve known me for months, you can come off the politeness,” she humphs, attempting to throw herself up onto the horse over one wax-white arm. Seeing his raised eyebrows, she sighs and growls and says: “Father’s gone missing. I have to go after him.”

Lumiere’s eyebrows skyrocket ever higher. “Alone? Which way did he go?”

“Toward the woods.” She throws one angry arm out, and notices—somehow, through her ice-blind fear and rage—how startled Lumiere looks at the mention of the forest. A strange emotion, on a usually sapped-free man. 

“Alone?” he says, again, and his hands tighten on the reins. Belle could murder him, right then. Each second keeps Maurice in further danger. 

“Yes, Lumiere, because what else would I do? Rally the army?” She throws her hands into the air. “I haven’t anyone else to call. I’m going into the woods, alone, and I hope you light a candle for me tonight when you say your prayers.”

His face has gone even whiter, as if that were possible. “You are not going alone, mademoiselle.”

“I’m going, and that’s that. Now move.”

“Wait one second,” he says, quietly, tenderly, and for a moment Belle is shocked by what she sees on his face: great love, not for her but for— _something_. The world. A whole world that he loves, or loved—some great affection that could not keep from pouring out, not now when her cry and fear reached out.

“Wait one second, mademoiselle,” he repeats, and vanishes into the heart of Villeneuve.

She waits, biting her cheeks, checking the position of the sun. It’s late afternoon now, and it is hours to get to the fair—and at any point Maurice might have gone astray, into the forest where she had never been. What could Lumiere need to give her so badly? A bag of supplies? Maybe an extra cloak, in case it was cold in the woods?

She’s so busy looking at the sky she doesn’t see them until they gather around her, tense and waiting, their cloaks on for traveling. 

Her eyes widen, she bites her tongue, the sun nearly falls out of the sky.

Cogsworth, his little brown pony saddled. 

Mrs. Potts and Chip, bundled up to the nines, just Chip’s nose peeking out from all his scarves and coats.

Chapeau, fiddle in hand, solemn and wise.

And Plumette, fidgeting, not quite ready to meet anyone’s eyes.

“You…you all came? For me?” Belle stares.

“You’re in trouble,” says Mrs. Potts. “And we all know how you love your father.”

The group nods. Chapeau plucks out half a tune—Belle recognizes it as the one the music box plays; the Montmartre tune her father told her of, that she in turn shared a whole winter ago, when her friends met in a chapel every week and exchanged food and books and some strange sort of love. No one moves. The horses stamp their feet, and no one looks at anyone else, and Belle realizes that—during the worst sorrow she can imagine, not the good thing her father pictured—her little band of dreamers are suddenly together again.

She launches onto Philippe’s back. “I hope you can all ride fast.”

Mrs. Potts pulls Chip up onto the potter’s donkey. “Well, dear, we can’t gallop, but keep a steady pace and we’ll keep up.”

“I don’t have a horse,” says Plumette.

“Borrow mine,” says Lumiere, too generously, skipping over the part where he in turn “borrowed” it from an unattended hitching post. 

“Oh, for goodness sake,” mutters Cogsworth, ignoring the symphony of awkwardness as Chapeau helped Plumette up onto a horse not built for two. 

They ride for the woods, Villeneuve’s shadow lengthening behind them. They follow the tracks of Belle’s lost father, not quite looking at each other, not quite over all their fear. 

But there’s no room for fear in a wood that is fearful enough.


	15. An Open Door

The forest bites with frost; the blue-white flowers that dot the side of the path are bowed over in snow. The day darkens unnaturally fast. Belle shakes her head and shakes off fear, but her friends draw back against hte call of the deep, dark wood.

Mrs. Potts is terrified; she holds Chip close, murmuring a nightmare and a prayer. Cogsworth grinds to a halt. Chapeau’s hands tremble. Lumiere’s eyes flicker in shade to match his heartbeat: blue, gray, blue, gray, unsteady as a dying breath.

“Fifty Frenchmen can’t be wrong,” says Cogsworth. “No one in the village would come near this wood.”

Plumette’s hands are taut against the reins. “No love can be worth this,” she murmurs. She thinks of her past twenty years: so many empty nights, and fleeing days; the way the fear of being touched slowly spread its way across her heart. The brutes of the village never saw her as anything beyond a pretty one-night stand. She doesn’t want to say to Belle that maybe she believes love is not worth fighting for—but her whole life has told her that it isn’t.

Lumiere, sitting just behind her, cups his hands over hers. She’s shocked by the flicker of warmth in them. “I know it’s not something for us to understand,” he says, his voice hollow, “but perhaps it makes sense to her. Perhaps she would do anything to see her father again.” 

Belle looks back at them, sitting mute on their horses in the middle of the snow. A downed tree crossing their path—burnt by lightning, it looks like—adds to the feeling of defeat. She sees sagging shoulders, saddened faces, Chip sniffling back a crying fit. 

Belle breathes deep. Instinctively, her friends gather close: as if she’s some tree of life, some space of safety in the wood. She looks at them, carefully: their threadworn jackets, their cold faces. The gray that flickers in their faces. How to make them understand?

“Love…..it’s not a thing you can forget.” She coughs. Cold is lacing at her lungs. She says it louder. “It’s not something that stands idle. Even when my father couldn’t say anything—when he remembered the days of my mother, and retreated into silence for a week or two—I still knew that he loved me, I still saw that. Even when he moved us from town to town, even when I forgot the roots of one town so I could put them down in another, I knew that I was _loved_. And you would understand it, too, if you had been loved that deeply and that well—if you knew right now how much you were loved. How much you were always loved—and how much you could love back.”

They stand in a cluster of fir trees, clutching their cloaks. An icy wind cuts across their cheeks, pushing aside the boughs of the evergreens.

Chapeau straightens. “Is that a _castle_?”

They cross the icy gates. 

It’s deathly quiet. No sign of light in the windows; no sounds of scuffling feet, or cheerful argument, nor any of the little sounds that mark out home. If it weren’t for the roses in the garden—as perfectly tended as Belle’s garden at home—they might think no one lived here at all.

“What a lonely place,” says Mrs. Potts. “Let’s turn back, Belle, now, really.”

Belle shoves at the door. “My father is there,” she says. “I’m not turning back.”

They enter the palace—not without reluctance, not without Belle’s determination. They enter the gray halls. 

Destruction everywhere: clawmarks on the floor, shreds in curtains any maid could take care of if they only had a care, the remains of dead animals rotting along the stairs. The place smells like death. 

“If only a little light!” cries Lumiere. His voice echoes off the walls. 

“Do you hear that?” says Cogsworth, freezing. He keeps thinking he’ll hear the sound of something in this dead, wild place—the sound of order, of home, of ticking clocks and a polished, happy life. _Why do I know this?_ He thinks. _Why do I expect anything of this terror?_

“Papa! Papa.” Belle is deaf to their fear. She runs up the stairs, ignoring the darkness, ignoring her lack of a guide. Plumette pushes a white rose aside (the place is overgrown with roses). They follow Belle through in the halls of a dead palace, treading their way carefully, their fingers tracing along the broken walls of the tumble-down castle.

Mrs. Potts puts a hand on Lumiere’s arm. “Do you know this place?“

"Never, never,” says Lumiere, his face white, voice shaking. “But this way—the kitchen’s this way.”

But they never make it to the kitchen, because they hear the roar, and hear the great paws against the floor, and when Belle is only a stairway away from her father (the wrong stairway, though; no candle to guide her way, no voice to lead her on), the creature towers above her, its mangled fur rotting in its face, its great yellow teeth barred into a snarl. For a moment, she is alone with the Beast, and she sees its horrifying eyes, and feels its dark, blood-scented breath, and then—

“Oh, my god,“ Mrs. Potts screams, and Chapeau reaches out his hands in warning, and Cogsworth is there and Lumiere is there and Plumette is there, and all of them see the Beast.

Belle can't quite breathe.


	16. The Wonder of Us

And the beast, alive with speechless pain, whips around to them, his tail lashing against his hind legs; and great blue eyes stare out at them, no words behind them, and Mrs. Potts is filled with horror. And something else, she can’t quite name. Something like _….compassion_. 

And then the creature speaks, its voice creaking and grating up against growls. It’s clear the monster hasn’t spoken for a long, long time. 

“Who—who are these?”

“They’re my friends,” says Belle, torn from the cause of her father by this massive creature, monstrous behind all her reckoning, absolutely unbelievable to anyone of Villeneuve. His matted hair has golden locks. Blue threads twine through his mane. 

“Your…your friends?” His massive paws pace against the floor, as he takes each one in turn. The tall, white one, with a nose like a drip of wax. The pretty one, feathers in her hair. The old woman who smells like home, and the old man whose hands grip his cane with misplaced terror, and the one with a fiddle strapped to his back. The little boy whose smile says that all his dreams have come awake. 

“Friends,” croaks the Beast. He coughs, and clears his throat, and tries again. “My friends. Mrs. Potts.” 

Mrs. Potts gasps and draws away. Chip comes forward, his eyes wide, his face hesitant, his smile shivering in the wake of this recognized fantasy. 

“Chip. It’s Chip, isn’t it?” The creature still seems unused to human speech, but he sits back on his haunches, and his paws flex, and the claws retract, and for a moment Belle sees human hands. The boy nods, feverish with excitement, crying: “Chapeau, too! Say Chapeau.”

“Chapeau. I would never forget,” says the Beast, and Belle wonders at how every moment his growl grows softer. He seems afraid to touch them, but Belle sees the wish in every tense-stringed muscle. “You brought your fiddle with you.” Chapeau touches it, uncertain, eyes lingering between the creature and his instrument. The Beast stares at it so wistfully—so desperate—so strange, so human, so completely beyond all village life. Belle would swear he knows that fiddle, has known every song it could play. 

“Plumette, do you remember me?” says the Beast. “Did you let yourself remember? I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry for how I treated you—” The roar and rumble rises, anguished; the ceiling trembles, and the palace crumbles, and somewhere everything shifts and turns. The Beast is crying, human tears, his muzzle streaked with grief. “You don’t remember, do you? Lumiere, Cogsworth, I know every name, I _know_.” 

_Please don’t hurt him,_ Belle prays, not knowing where it comes from. The air is hushed and full of fear. _Please don’t hurt this Beast._

“We can’t—” whispers Lumiere.

“We shouldn’t—” says Cogsworth.

“We never—” cries Mrs. Potts.

The Beast roars in agony. The castle is shuddering like a living thing, and he falls to the ground, his claws drawing blood along his arms, his horns growing wilder and fiercer and causing him unending pain.

“The curse came too quickly,” he mourns, “The rose has dropped its last petal, I can’t—oh, my god, get her out of here, get your friend out of here—before I turn completely, for the last time—”

The villagers draw back, ready to flee from monster or man. Somewhere, the last petal trembles and dies.

“I love you,” whispers someone who once had a name.

The creature crashes to the floor, a great monstrous animal howling in pain. His strength leaves him; his blood drips from his own paws. He shakes and keens, words leaving, pain eating up his bones. The little villagers should be running, witless, for their safe homes far from magic. 

And yet—

Cogsworth is standing like gears are turning in his head—his hands keep coming up, against his more reasonable mind, in jerky motions of recognition, of respect. Mrs. Potts is stuttering—knowledge coming and going in little bursts and puffs, her eyes clouding with gray and steeping deeper every moment. Chapeau simply stares, silent; his eyes stay locked on the Beast, like he can never stare enough. Plumette falls to the creature’s side, her eyes reaching out, feather-soft, to touch his shuddering side; and Lumiere is cradling the creature’s head in his lap, brushing his fur out with his long, slender hands, feeling for a pulse in the fur. 

“You know him,” whispers Belle, breathless.

“We all know him,” says Mrs Potts. “As well as I know the back of my hands—as well as I know my kitchen, or my son.”

“This is _impossible_ ,” says Cogsworth. “Master—”

“Quit your whining, Cogsworth, and get a bandage,” cries Lumiere. “Maître! Awake!”

“He’s going fast,” says Chapeau, watching the wild blue eyes cloud over in pain.

“No, no, don’t you dare,” whispers Plumette. “Adam, we never forgot you. We could never forget you. Not entirely.”

“Yes! Yes,” says Lumiere, latching onto Plumette’s words. “Why, we were in the village—we were lost—but we still told stories about you!”

“We were looking for you, though we didn’t know how or why,” says Mrs. Potts. “We befriended Belle, because she reminded us of you.”

“Even if the mind stops,” says Cogsworth, “the heart remembers. The heart always knows.”

“No matter what,” says Lumiere, looking at Plumette. “Even when we can’t find the form to say it.”

“Love is love,” says Plumette, and runs her hand down the cheek of the gasping, dying Beast. “We love you.” 

* * *

The flash of light that spreads out from the monster is blue and gold and glittering and terrifying, and Belle can’t see her friends inside the glimmering sheath of gold. She thinks she hears a gasp—a hush—a yell!—but it’s hard to tell, because there’s singing from everywhere, and she can’t see the monster at all, caught in a hug from people capable of great love. 

When the blinding light stops, she is in a strange hall, glittering in gold and silver, so different from the gloomy stairs. The room is crowded, and people are talking fast and loud, like a music box determined to sing its whole song all at once. Belle stands back, in shock and awe, seeing strangers. 

Though perhaps they weren’t _so_ strange. Didn’t she see a Parisian gesture in that gold-dressed courtier, his face alive with love for the whole world? Wasn’t there a touch of clock-keeper to the old gentleman, dignity exemplified, with a neat brown waistcoat where village rags had been? The maid was so familiar, her eyes alight, the grace of twenty years of courtly dancing in her feet—and didn’t she know the man with a fiddle, a whole history behind his tunes now, embracing a housekeeper’s boy thrumming with energy as his mum cries with joy?

And the man in the center of it all, crouching with shock in the middle of a hug each servant had no wish to ever leave—didn’t she know him best of all, in all these strangers, so well she could recognize him anywhere? The hero of every half-forgotten anecdote, the character she loved best in each of her friends’ old stories: the golden haired boy who wouldn’t stop reading, the temperamental man who translated Greek myth for fun, the one who taught Lumiere fantasies and made Mrs. Potts laugh and listened to Cogsworth and sent Plumette flowers for her birthday, every year, just because he was wild and free and loved giving flowers when he could. Oh, he had flaws too—Belle had heard of pride, and vanity, and temper, and howling—but Belle loved a character who felt so real, who was no Prince Charming but a strange, and wild, and delightful man. 


End file.
